05 November 21
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America’s real democracy crisis is this: corporations use a system of legalized bribery to buy public policy, which prevents popular progressive policies from passing and erodes Americans’ faith in their government.
Seven years later, America is witnessing a very public and explicit illustration of this situation in real time — and Tuesday’s off-year election results are the latest confirmation that the country seems pretty ticked off about the situation ahead of the 2022 midterms.
In America’s nationalized politics, those off-year elections were dominated by headlines from Washington, where President Joe Biden and Democratic lawmakers have spent months agreeing to whittle down their social spending reconciliation bill at the demand of corporate donors and their congressional puppets.
The cuts almost perfectly spotlight the democracy crisis. Indeed, the specific initiatives being slashed or watered down in the Biden agenda bill share two traits: 1) They would require the wealthy and powerful to sacrifice a bit of their wealth and power, and 2) They are quite literally the most popular proposals among rank-and-file voters.
Dems Are Slashing the Things Voters Most Want
New polling demonstrates the silencing effect that systemic corruption is having on voter preferences:
- 82 percent of registered voters support adding dental and vision benefits to Medicare — and this is voters’ “top priority” for Democrats’ social spending bill, according to survey data from Morning Consult. Conservative Democratic senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona have pushed to keep these benefits out of the bill, following an aggressive lobbying campaign by health insurers who enjoy massive profits from the privatized Medicare Advantage program.
- Another top priority for voters is allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices, with 72 percent saying they support the idea, according to Morning Consult. Sinema and a few House Democrats backed by the pharmaceutical industry managed to block the party’s original drug pricing measure from being put into the reconciliation bill. On Tuesday, Democrats announced they had reached a deal on a drug pricing plan, which Politico described as “far weaker” than Democrats’ promised legislation. One industry analyst said the deal “seems designed to let legislators claim an achievement while granting pharma protection.”
- The poll also found 70 percent of voters support including paid family and medical leave for new parents in Democrats’ spending bill. Manchin has demanded this item be cut — reportedly after he inexplicably asked about imposing work requirements on it, too.
- After railing against the GOP’s 2017 tax law for years, Democrats have largely refused to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations, and they are reportedly solidifying a deal to have the bill spend more on brand new tax breaks for the superrich than on the fight against climate change. This, even though Biden’s own pollsters found that raising taxing on the wealthy was “the most popular of more than 30 economic proposals” they tested during the 2020 presidential campaign.
Many of these findings were summarized in a memo last month from the Biden-aligned nonprofit Priorities USA, which warned that “there could be consequences” if Democrats fail to deliver on their promised agenda. The organization wrote that its polling found the most popular issue among swing voters was “the Democratic proposal to make the wealthy and corporations pay their fair share in taxes.” The second most popular item was adding dental, vision, and hearing benefits to Medicare and allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices.
The flip side of all this also appears to be true — Democrats have protected initiatives to enrich powerful corporations, even though some of those measures aren’t very popular. One example: subsidies for health insurance plans purchased on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace that shower money on for-profit insurers. Morning Consult reports that extending new ACA premium tax credits passed by Democrats in March “is the lowest-ranking of all the health measures included in the poll.”
A slim majority of voters notably told Morning Consult that Democrats’ negotiations over the individual components of their social spending plan have been unproductive — suggesting people aren’t entirely as dumb as Congress thinks.
The results of this latest middle finger to voter preferences? New polling data shows that almost three quarters of Americans now think the country is headed in the wrong direction.
This Is the Hostile Takeover
Taken together, this is the democracy crisis thrumming underneath all the media noise — the day-to-day erosion of democracy by corporations that use a system of legalized bribery to buy public policy, which then erodes Americans’ faith in their government and leads to all the down-ballot that unfolded on Tuesday night.
And yet this erosion does not get discussed in a media-directed democracy discourse that focuses almost exclusively on the January 6 insurrection or Republican efforts to deny election results and limit voting.
That dichotomy is an expression of corporate power. Corruption is omitted from most corporate media coverage because their corporate sponsors are the ones doing the vote-buying. By contrast, the insurrection and GOP assault on voting are safe topics for corporate media, because they do not threaten the power of the media’s corporate sponsors.
This is what my 2006 book called the “Hostile Takeover”: the conquest of democratic institutions by moneyed interests, to the point where “the world’s greatest democracy” routinely rejects the commonsense policies that the vast majority of voters want and that every other high-income country has already adopted.
The hostile takeover is not merely the rejection of the most popular policies — it is also the media discourse itself. The Washington press is constantly portraying industry-bankrolled opponents of majoritarian policies as “moderates” or “centrists” and depicting supporters of those policies as fringe lunatics who refuse to be reasonable and compromise.
Meanwhile, there is a pervasive omertà that silences most media discussion of the corporate influence and corruption that so obviously defines American politics — and there is scant mention that the “moderate” obstructionists are bankrolled by the industries lobbying to kill the popular policies that Americans want.
In short: the takeover is so complete, we can’t even talk about it or debate it in the public square — and when someone dares to sneak in a mention of it, it is akin to a fleeting glitch in the matrix or seeing a real-life unicorn.
The Daily Poster and other independent media outlets are trying to change this — we work everyday to report out the campaign-cash context of public policy decisions. And it is not a coincidence that we have seen a surge of subscribers as we’ve followed the money around the agenda bill negotiations and as corporate media has written money’s influence out of story.
This is encouraging proof that more and more Americans innately understand the kleptocratic nature of their government, and want explicit accountability journalism to uncover it. Also mildly encouraging is the impact of that reporting in the reconciliation bill battle: Democrats tried to get rid of all the drug pricing provisions, but were successfully shamed into adding at least a few of the (pathetically weak) provisions back in after independent media aggressively exposed the pharma ties of key lawmakers, and then grassroots activists pressured them to relent.
It’s not a huge victory and not worthy of some effusive celebration of Democrats because the provisions are watered down and a betrayal of the party’s promise to do something a lot better. But it’s a minimal proof-of-concept win.
It may at least get the idea of Medicare negotiating drug prices into law for the first time. And as important, it shows that when there is a robust press willing to challenge power, the government can be forced — kicking and screaming — to respond, or at least pretend to respond (and in this case Democrats touting the deal better hope it does something — anything! — to actually reduce drug prices, or voters will be rightly ticked off that Democrats are once again selling them a false bill of goods).
That the response in this case was embarrassingly weak is a reflection of how small the independent press is and how outmatched grassroots activists still are. The takeaway, then, is that it’s going to take a whole lot more of that kind of reporting and a whole lot more movement pressure to secure real wins and beat back the hostile takeover.
The silver lining here is that at least that takeover is now explicit. The polls showing what people want compared to what’s being excised from the reconciliation bill make this part of the democracy crisis impossible to deny — and ending that denial is a prerequisite for achieving something better.
Immigrants sent back to Mexico at an encampment near the border. (photo: Henry Romero/Reuters)
"I am not willing to or able to emotionally and physically continue to put my life at risk because the Biden administration has broken its promise and decided to reinstate this utterly evil program."
The immigration attorneys say they won't be complicit in the relaunch of the Migrant Protection Protocols, also known as MPP or the "Remain in Mexico" program, which they say is not only dangerous but takes away the due process rights of immigrants and asylum-seekers. Organizations that help immigrants at the border will continue their work, said Sue Kenney-Pfalzer, director of the border and asylum network at HIAS, the Jewish nonprofit that aids refugees. But signing on to a list created by the administration that will send more immigrants into squalid border camps and crowded shelters than they can represent is a "farce" and a "hollow gesture," she said.
"For all of us, our duty is to the migrants, not the US government," Kenney-Pfalzer told BuzzFeed News. "What we're not going to do is be complicit with the government in trying to make MPP somehow more palatable, because there's no way MPP can be made more humane. It's illegal and inhumane."
The program was created in January 2019 under former president Donald Trump and forced more than 71,000 immigrants and asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico for months, and in some cases years, while a US judge considers their case. In June, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas formally ended the policy, but a federal judge then ordered the administration to restart it, which could happen as soon as mid-November.
Immigration advocates have said the administration hasn't done enough to fight the court order, and they've criticized how lists of pro bono attorneys have been used by officials when MPP was previously running.
When an immigrant would show up to their court hearing without an attorney, judges would give them more time to find representation, postponing their case for months and referring them to a list of pro bono attorneys. The problem was that many legal aid organizations were already overwhelmed with thousands of immigrants asking for help and couldn't take on most of the new cases. The pro bono list, advocates said, became a false beacon of hope for immigrants and asylum-seekers.
Felipe, an asylum-seeker from Honduras who was placed in the MPP program with his family, said he was handed a list of pro bono legal aid providers when he attended his first court hearing. The hearing took place in a tent in Brownsville, Texas, and the judge presided remotely, appearing via a screen.
"I called the numbers on the list, but no one ever picked up," Felipe told BuzzFeed News.
Without a lawyer, it's hard to figure out how to fill out asylum paperwork and know what to tell a judge, Felipe said, and it's only made more difficult for immigrants who live under the constant fear of being kidnapped, attacked, and extorted by criminals at the border who see them as easy targets.
"The judges were deciding MPP cases unjustly because we didn't know how to do things correctly," Felipe said. "We didn't have a chance."
Only about 10% of the 71,044 immigrants placed in the MPP program were able to get representation, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), and having a lawyer makes the chances of winning an asylum case significantly higher.
The Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), which oversees the nation's immigration courts, declined to say how many organizations had so far agreed to be a part of the pro bono list that will be given to immigrants in MPP.
On Oct. 28, EOIR sent an email saying it was still seeking providers to be added to a list of pro bono legal services interested in offering aid via "remote technology." The list, EOIR said, will be given to immigrants in MPP who have hearings in San Diego and the three Texas cities of El Paso, Harlingen, and San Antonio.
"We will be expediting the application process due to the urgent need for pro bono legal services among the MPP population," the email said.
Refusing to be on the pro bono list is not the first time advocates have refused to work with the Biden administration on the reimplementation of MPP. On Oct. 16, border organizations "walked out" of a virtual meeting with White House staff over upcoming plans to restart MPP, saying they could no longer have conversations in good conscience with the Biden administration because it has continued to preserve policies enacted by Trump, including a policy that allows the US to quickly expel immigrants at the border.
Last week, the administration issued a second memo rescinding MPP, months after its first attempt was thwarted by a judge for not complying with the Administrative Procedure Act. Advocates have criticized the amount of time that passed between the two memos, which DHS officials acknowledged took "some time" to go through necessary materials in a recent call with reporters.
In spite of the new memo, the officials said, the Biden administration may still be obligated under the court order to restart MPP.
"If and when Mexico agrees to accept returns and the injunction has not yet been lifted, we will be bound to begin to place people back into MPP," a DHS official said. "We are hopeful that there will be groups and entities that will come forward and provide the access to counsel that we all know is so urgently needed."
The Mexican government, which has to agree to take back immigrants returned across the border before MPP can be restarted, has expressed concerns about due process and receiving vulnerable people sent back to the country, administration officials said.
Taylor Levy, an attorney who would regularly go to Ciudad Juárez to help immigrants in MPP, said advocates don't want to be added to the pro bono list because it could be used by the Biden administration to demonstrate to Mexico that the new version of the program will include increased access to legal counsel.
Organizations and attorneys that provide legal aid to immigrants will help those in MPP once it starts again, Levy said, but she will no longer be one of them. In her time working with immigrants in MPP, Levy said, she was threatened by cartels.
"I watched a family get kidnapped in front of me, and I was told point-blank to my face to step aside or else I was going to have problems,” Levy told BuzzFeed News. "I watched a mother and father with a toddler in their arms sob and beg for help, and all I could do was watch because I needed to protect my life."
She remembered one family who was trying to attend their MPP hearing show up bloody, bruised, and dirty to the border after they were kidnapped on the way to court. Ciudad Juárez police beat them and orally raped the pregnant wife in front of her husband and mother-in-law, Levy said.
She tried to help the family, even though she knew she was putting her own life at risk by attracting attention from Mexican police and the cartel, whose lookouts told her they knew who she was. From February 2019 to February 2021, Human Rights First counted at least 1,544 public reports of murder, rape, and other attacks committed against people in MPP across the US–Mexico border. After two years of working with immigrants and asylum-seekers in MPP and facing hours of questions about her work by US Customs and Border Protection officers, Levy said, she was diagnosed with PTSD and couldn't go back to doing the same work.
"I am not willing to or able to emotionally and physically continue to put my life at risk, because the Biden administration has broken its promise and decided to reinstate this utterly evil program," Levy said. "There is no way to make it humane. There is no way to ensure due process."
Nicole Morgan, family detention attorney for the immigrant advocacy organization RAICES, said the group will remain on the general pro bono list that immigration courts provide immigrants, but the group will not be on the MPP list.
"We are not going to legitimize this program by giving them the veneer of providing access to counsel or due process," Morgan said in a statement to BuzzFeed News.
Felipe, the immigrant previously in MPP, and his family were able to reopen their case and enter the US after initially losing their asylum case while waiting in Mexico in January 2020. He blamed the initial loss on his unfamiliarity with the US's asylum laws and how to properly fill out the family’s application. He hopes that now that he’s in the US he'll be able to find an attorney and win their case.
As the Biden administration prepares to restart MPP, Felipe thinks about the families placed in the program under Trump who are still in Mexico.
"I know mothers and fathers living in shelters for years who are still waiting in Mexico for an opportunity," Felipe said.
Protesters march through the streets of Atlanta to call for the arrest of police officers involved in the killing of Jamarion Robinson in Atlanta, on June 20, 2020. (photo: Steve Eberhardt/Zuma)
The indictment of a deputy U.S. marshal and Georgia police officer in the killing of Jamarion Robinson was applauded by his family. Experts say the case will most likely fail.
“What happened to my son was very heinous,” Robinson told NBC News. “We demand accountability.”
The officers — Eric Heinze, a deputy U.S. marshal, and Kristopher Hutchens, a Clayton County police officer — were working for a federal fugitive task force at the time they shot Robinson's son, who the officers say brandished a weapon and presented a deadly threat.
The task force, one of dozens across the country, is made up of federal agents and local cops deputized with federal powers to cross state lines and track down people wanted on arrest warrants.
The case marks what is believed to be the first time that a member of the U.S. Marshals Service has faced charges for a fatal shooting while on duty, an agency spokesman said.
But prosecutors have a steep hill to climb in securing a conviction for the two officers, or even a minor charge that sticks, according to former federal officials and civil rights lawyers.
A complex web of decades-old U.S Supreme Court rulings and federal laws makes it exceedingly difficult for local prosecutors to successfully charge federal agents after a deadly encounter, even if they seem to have violated state law.
“The courts have created a number of special protections that shield these officers from any sort of accountability,” said Patrick Jaicomo, an attorney with the libertarian Institute for Justice who has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court for more accountability over federal law enforcement.
The first obstacle confronting local prosecutors is the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, which says that states must defer to federal law. Federal judges have long accepted the argument that it shields federal agents from state prosecutions when an incident occurred while they were on duty, legal experts say.
Lawyers for the officers have already filed federal court papers and succeeded in getting the case transferred from state to federal court. In such cases, federal judges typically dismiss the charges on the grounds that state prosecutors cannot charge federal actors for state crimes, said Jaicomo and other experts.
Roy Austin, a former deputy assistant attorney general under President Barack Obama, said even if a federal judge decided to take on such a case, prosecutors would face another enormous hurdle unique to the federal system: proving that a law enforcement officer is guilty of “willfully” depriving someone of their civil rights.
Congress failed to pass a sweeping police reform bill this year that would have amended the law by changing “willfully” to “recklessly” violating a person’s rights.
As is, Austin said, the bar is too high.
“Basically a law enforcement officer can get away with murder and not face repercussions,” Austin said, speaking broadly about the federal standard. “It absolutely needs to be reformed.”
In recent years, increasing numbers of police officers have been charged in line-of-duty shootings or deaths. But no experts contacted by NBC News could identify a single case of a federal agent being convicted for killing someone in the line of duty.
That the Georgia man, Jamarion Robinson, 26, allegedly had a gun further complicates the task ahead for Fulton County prosecutors, experts said.
“This is a hard case, but it doesn’t change the principle of the problem,” said Jonathan M. Smith, who oversaw investigations into abusive local police departments for the Justice Department under the Obama administration.
“There is very little accountability over federal law enforcement, and they don’t have the same type of oversight that you would see in local law enforcement agencies.”
The shooting took place in August 2016 when the task force members were serving an arrest warrant for Robinson, who was wanted on charges of attempted arson and aggravated assault of a police officer.
Robinson, a former star football player who suffered from schizophrenia, was struggling with his mental health in the weeks before the incident, according to his mother.
In July, she called police after he poured gasoline on the floor inside her home, leading to the attempted arson charge. A few weeks later, Robinson allegedly pointed a gun at two Atlanta cops after someone called 911 to report that he was harassing residents of an apartment complex, police say. He was not arrested.
The Atlanta Police Department then contacted the U.S. Marshals Southeast Regional Fugitive Force for help to track down Robinson. A task force officer called Monteria Robinson and asked if she knew where her son had gone, U.S. Marshals documents show. She told the officer that her son was off his medication and increasingly unstable.
At around 1:25 p.m.on Aug. 5, 2016, the task force members armed with flash bang grenades and a surveillance robot showed up outside the home of Jamarion Robinson’s girlfriend in East Point, Ga., according to a Georgia Bureau of Investigation probe into the shooting.
A neighbor’s cellphone video appears to show officers standing outside the entryway with their guns drawn as one yelled, “Throw the gun down.” Within seconds, gunfire erupted.
Heinze and Hutchens fired at Robinson, according to the state probe. Heinze told investigators that Robinson had pointed a gun at him. A .380 firearm was later recovered near Robinson’s bullet-riddled body, according to court papers.
His family disputes that he had a gun.
A medical examiner’s report documented 76 gunshot wounds but did not specify how many were exit wounds. Court papers filed by the then-Fulton County district attorney and Robinson’s family said he was shot a total of 59 times.
His family filed a wrongful death suit against the officers, but a federal civil judge sided with law enforcement earlier this year saying that the shooting was justified.
Then came the news last Tuesday that a Fulton County grand jury handed down an eight-count indictment against Heinze and Hutchens, charging them with felony murder as well as aggravated assault, first-degree burglary, making false statements and violating the oath of a public officer.
Don Samuel, Hutchens’ lawyer, said he expects the criminal case will remain in federal court since it’s clear that the officers were working as federal agents facing off against an armed fugitive.
“The Supreme Court has said that a state cannot prosecute a federal officer who is acting in the line of duty,” Samuel said. “The DA, to put it bluntly, is more interested in the politics of having indicted law enforcement rather than really looking at the evidence.”
Jeff DiSantis, spokesman for the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office, declined to comment on whether prosecutors were gearing up for a legal battle to keep the case in state court.
In the meantime, Hutchens is still working full-time with the Clayton Police Department, said department spokeswoman Sgt. Julia Isaac. The U.S. Marshals have placed Heinze on desk duty, a spokesman said.
“He was facing a serious deadly threat and was serving a valid arrest warrant,” said Heinze’s lawyer Lance LoRusso.
The Supreme Court ruled in 1890 that a California sheriff couldn’t jail a deputy U.S. marshal who shot a man on a train while trying to protect a judge. The justices argued that state authorities couldn’t imprison a federal officer for an incident that occurred while he was performing his official duties.
Federal agents and task force officers have pointed to the century-old case as the legal basis for why they can’t face local charges. In 2018, the court declined to take up an appeal of a case in which local prosecutors were seeking to charge an Austin police detective for fatally shooting a man while serving as a member of a federal task force.
The court’s influence, law enforcement officials argue, is even more pronounced as hundreds of police departments embed their officers within a network of federal task forces across the country. The U.S. Marshals estimate that about 3,500 local cops are part of their federal teams. Even more are partnered on task forces with the FBI, ATF, and DEA.
A separate battle between local prosecutors and the federal courts is playing out in Virginia. In October 2020, the commonwealth attorney in Fairfax County filed manslaughter charges against two U.S. Parks Police officers accused of fatally shooting an unarmed motorist after pursuing him following a minor accident in which his car was rear-ended.
The officers asked a federal judge to take the case, arguing that the Constitution protects federal law enforcement from facing state charges. The judge dismissed the case earlier this month. Local prosecutors recently filed an appeal.
“We do not believe the law allows an individual to circumvent the accountability of the criminal justice system simply because of who their employer is,” said Charlotte Gomer, spokesperson for Virginia’s attorney general.
Robinson’s mother said she has faith that local prosecutors will fight to keep the case related to her son’s killing. If it goes to a federal judge, she said she will not stop pressing for justice.
“If a judge tries not to convict them, that means that they’re turning a blind eye to justice, they’re turning a blind eye to accountability,” Monteria Robinson said. “Me and my team will fight them, tooth and nail, every inch of the way.”
Kellogg's cereal plant workers and their families demonstrate in front of the plant on October 7, 2021, in Battle Creek, Michigan. (photo: Rey Del Rio/Getty)
Workers at Kellogg’s cereal plants across the United States are still on strike. As the company drags out the bargaining process, workers, now without health insurance, are demanding a contract without concessions.
The key issue is Kellogg’s desire to expand a two-tier system in the contract. The workers are members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers’ International Union (BCTGM), a union that has struck at both Frito-Lay and Nabisco in recent months. They say the company’s desire to expand the contract’s tiers would undermine their union by pitting workers against one another while also placing a target on the back of those workers slotted into the higher tier, as the company would see them as a cost in need of cutting.
The specifics of how this works are as follows: in a previous contract, workers agreed to the creation of a “transitional” class of employees who receive lower pay and benefits. That category is capped at 30 percent of the workforce, a means of keeping Kellogg’s from simply hiring more and more lower-cost workers. But in the latest negotiations, the company is pushing to lift that cap, all but ensuring the company will steadily phase out the livable wages and benefits current workers have secured in favor of transforming Kellogg’s jobs into low-paid work.
As Kevin Bradshaw, vice president of Local 252G and a case-sealer operator at the Memphis plant, where he has worked for twenty years, told me when the strike began, two-tier threatens the future of the workplace and the union itself. “Why would any worker in the future want to be a part of a union that sold them out and allows them to work the rest of their lives with no insurance and no benefits once they retire?” he asked.
It is an existential question — one over which Kellogg’s workers are willing to strike. They are not alone in seeing it that way. In a range of industries, workers are rejecting tiered contracts, even if it means going on strike.
At John Deere, where ten thousand United Auto Workers (UAW) members are still on strike after recently rejecting another tentative agreement, the company’s proposal to weaken benefits for new hires has provoked ire and outrage among a workforce already subject to a tiered system that was originally instituted in 1997. At Kaiser Permanente, too, some fifty thousand health care workers are preparing to walk off the job to resist, among other issues, the company’s desire to lower wages for people hired beginning in January 2023.
Kellogg’s, like these other employers, hasn’t realized the moment we’re now in. Workers have leverage in a tighter-than-usual labor market, and a growing number of those in unions are using that strength to refuse concessions and try to claw back those to which they previously agreed.
Workers at Kellogg’s cereal plants know they aren’t alone in taking this stand, and they know, too, that Kellogg’s has the money to agree to their proposals. Sales are up; Steve Cahillane, Kellogg’s CEO, made roughly $11.6 million last year; and the company recently authorized $1.5 billion in stock buybacks to boost shareholders’ returns. In light of these numbers, the argument that Kellogg’s can’t afford to accede to workers’ demands falls apart.
Yet the company is still resisting, trying to coerce those who kept its profits flowing for the past year — some of whom worked more than one hundred days straight — even at risk to their health and that of their families. Kellogg’s shut off workers’ health insurance when the strike began, a heinous attempt to force workers to agree to concessions, and a reminder that tying health care to employment status always gives the boss an advantage.
“Most are doing okay, but a few have health conditions that now don’t have any medical insurance, because the company cut our insurance off,” Bradshaw told me of Kellogg’s decision to deny strikers their health insurance. “We have people with scheduled surgeries, and some who, just as we speak, have been diagnosed with cancer — who have worked more than twenty years, who today can’t even get chemo and other treatments they need. Kellogg’s is playing really dirty!”
After weeks of silence, as workers continued their strike and Kellogg’s sought scabs, the company finally reached out to BCTGM in late October about returning to the bargaining table. As the union told members at the time, “They have finally signaled their willingness to reach an agreement that will include a path for all current and future employees to fully loaded wages and benefits to get rid of the two-tier system.”
On November 2, the bargaining committee offered another update. Negotiations had resumed, stretching late into the evening. But “there has been very little movement from the company on anything.” Kellogg’s decision to resume bargaining “seems as though [it] was just a media grab.”
The next day, the committee offered its latest update. Negotiations had ended at 5:19 p.m. after the company gave the union its last, best, and final offer. The committee wrote:
That offer does not achieve what we were asking, a pathway to fully vetted workers without takeaways. The company said they would get off their two-tier and get to a pathway, but they could not find a fully benefited way to achieve this. With this issue, we were unable to address the other items that are still on the table. We cannot recommend this offer and will not bring it back for the membership to vote on. We agreed that we will not have concessions, and that is all their last offer was.
We will be home tomorrow. We will continue this fight for as long as it takes!
Continue to hold the line and stand strong.
In a statement yesterday, BCTGM said, “Kellogg’s continues to insist on takeaways. The company came to the table insisting that there will only be an agreement if the union accepts the company proposal exactly as it has been written. The company’s proposal was filled with conditions and terms as to what was acceptable to Kellogg’s. These terms and conditions are unacceptable to our members.”
There are no more bargaining dates on the calendar. Workers say donations to their strike fund are appreciated, as they will hold the line until the company changes its tune.
Bystanders film as Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee on George Floyd's neck on May 25, 2020. (photo: AP)
By declining to hear a case from a federal appellate court, the Supreme Court let stand a dangerous ruling granting qualified immunity to Denver police officers accused of snatching a computer tablet from a man who had used it to record them punching a suspect in the face and grabbing his pregnant girlfriend, causing her to fall to the ground.
In recent years, such recordings have been vital to a national movement against racial injustice and excessive police force. In a few cases, the recordings have been a key to holding police accountable for a person’s brutal death.
Take, for example, the brave bystanders who recorded Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes while Floyd begged for his life. Without their videos, Chauvin might never have been tried and convicted of Floyd’s murder. Nor would there have been nationwide protests that helped launch police reform efforts across the country.
By refusing to take Frasier v. Evans, the Supreme Court managed to set back both the public’s right to record police and efforts to hold police accountable for violating citizens' constitutional rights.
Your rights vs. your ZIP code
The decision in this case makes the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals an outlier and leaves people living in the six states it covers – Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah and Wyoming – with weakened constitutional rights. Six other federal appeals courts, covering nearly half of the states, have ruled that citizens have a clear constitutional right to record police in public.
Because of this split, the Supreme Court needs to rule on the issue so Americans’ rights won’t depend on where they happen to live.
The Denver case began in August 2014, when Levi Frasier, a bystander, recorded police officers beating a suspect. According to the lawsuit Frasier later filed, police retaliated, demanding to see his tablet computer, grabbing it from him and searching for the video – all without a warrant and in violation of Frasier’s rights.
After failing to find the video, they let Frasier go with his tablet. Later he gave a copy of the video to a local news station, which aired it, and to the police department, which changed its use-of-force policy.
The police officers involved said they struck the suspect in the face to try to get him to release a sock in his mouth, which they believed contained contraband. They argued they did not violate any clearly established law by trying to obtain the video evidence from Frasier and therefore deserved qualified immunity – a broad shield against police accountability that courts have too often taken to extremes.
Police training on constitutional rights
The trial court rejected the cops’ immunity request after finding that the Denver Police Department had trained officers since 2007 that citizens have a First Amendment right to record police in public. In 2013, training also focused on a Justice Department declaration that “seizure or destruction of such recordings violates constitutional rights.”
The officers clearly should have known they were violating Frasier's rights.
Nevertheless, the 10th Circuit threw out Frasier’s case, ruling that training was “irrelevant” to whether the officers knew they were violating a “clearly established law.” The only thing that renders a law clearly established in the 10th Circuit, the court stated, is a ruling from the Supreme Court or the 10th Circuit.
If that sounds absurd, it’s because it is. It shows how far courts have gone to twist the doctrine of qualified immunity to let officers off the hook for egregious behavior.
Now, advocates from across the political spectrum seeking to limit qualified immunity are running out of options. Earlier this year, when the U.S. Senate tried to eliminate qualified immunity for police, Republican opposition killed that effort. This week, the Supreme Court could have reined in qualified immunity and ensured the public’s right to record police in action. Instead, it whiffed.
Unless Congress or the Supreme Court changes course, police officers will continue to have impunity in civil cases when they violate people’s rights, and Americans will lose even more trust in law enforcement.
A barrage of new data shows just how bad Facebook's climate misinformation problem is, and how the company profits from it. (photo: Sum of US)
A barrage of new data shows just how bad Facebook's climate misinformation problem is, and how the company profits from it.
And two of those reports show how the company is profiting on that toxic misinformation.
The first report shows that despite Facebook’s claims that it is putting more resources into tackling climate change misinformation on its platform, the level of engagement with such content shot up by 77% since the beginning of this year.
The researchers found that the number of reactions, comments, and shares on posts from Facebook pages and groups dedicated to spreading climate misinformation jumped 77 % since January. This means that each day, climate misinformation on the platform gets up to 1.36 million views. The number of those posts that are fact-checked is fewer than 4%.
This new study was conducted by climate advocacy group Stop Funding Heat and the Real Facebook Oversight Board, a watchdog group made up of academics, journalists, and activists. To highlight the report’s findings, activist group Sum of Us dumped 5000lb block of recycled ice in front of Congress, which revealed flames and Facebook’s logo as it melted.
“Our report shows the staggering scale of climate misinformation on Facebook, in posts, groups, and ads,” Sean Buchan, chief researcher for Stop Funding Heat said in an emailed statement.
“This is where the ambitions of COP26 and the revelations of the Facebook Papers collide, with our data showing Facebook is among the world’s biggest purveyors of climate misinformation. Clearly, Facebook’s Third-Party Fact-Checking Program, and its Climate Science Center, have failed.”
The second report comes from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which found that 69% of climate misinformation on Facebook was coming from just 10 publishers. These superspreaders, dubbed the “Toxic Ten,” include a number of right-wing outlets including Breitbart, which tops the list, as well as Newsmax, the Daily Wire, Western Journal, and the Washington Times.
Also among the so-called “super polluters” was the Media Research Center, a “think tank” that received funding from ExxonMobil.
The articles being spread by these publishers claim that those warning about the impending dangers are part of a “cult of climate change” whose “worship” risks people’s future. Others told their readers not to “worry too much about CO2 baking the planet.”
Facebook relies on a network of third-party fact-checking organizations to label content posted on the site as misinformation, but these groups are only able to assess a tiny fraction of the content posted on the network each day.
Like the Stop Funding Heat report, the CCDH researchers found that Facebook failed to label the vast majority of the content from the Toxic Ten publishers, catching just 8% of posts.
If that wasn’t bad enough, another analysis published this week showed how Facebook is not only failing to tackle climate misinformation, but also profiting from it.
Eco-Bot.Net is an AI system that reveals the hidden ecosystems of climate change disinformation on social media. In its first report published Monday, it found that fossil fuel companies such as Exxon, CEMEX, Shell, and Teck frequently use Facebook’s advertising tools to promote false and misleading narratives about climate change and/or the role of fossil fuels in it.
For example, an ExxonMobil targeting New Yorkers warned that a proposed new piece of legislation would “force” them to switch from gas to electric and would cost them “more than $25,600 to replace major appliances.” This is misleading: The proposed legislation only applies to new-build homes, Time reported.
And this type of greenwashing—a tactic companies use to misrepresent or overstate their green credentials—is rampant on Facebook. Eco-Bot.net found 1,700 climate misinformation ads on Facebook from 16 of the world’s biggest polluting companies have paid for some 1,700 climate misinformation ads, which altogether have received up to 150 million impressions.
Additionally, Stop Funding Heat’s research found 113 climate misinformation ads in Facebook’s own Ad Library between January and October 2021. Using Facebook’s own figures, almost 80% of the estimated total money spent on these ads came from a group of seven pages that were flagged as spreaders of climate misinformation a year ago by InfluenceMap, an independent think tank focusing on the climate crisis.
Adverts included phrases like “climate change is a HOAX” and “environmentalism...is tantamount to religion,” the researchers found.
Facebook did not immediately respond to VICE News’ request about these reports but has criticized them in comments to other publications. It told the Verge and Guardian respectively that the methodology used by Stop Funding Heat and CCDH was “flawed”—though it didn’t elaborate publicly on this claim.
Facebook also played up its Climate ScienceCenter, a central repository of climate change information from credible sources. Facebook this week announced that it was expanding the system to over 100 countries.
Facebook labels certain posts about climate change with information from the Center and links to further resources. The company claimed this week that the site is visited by 100,000 people per day.
But that number is dwarfed by the 1.3 million people who are viewing climate misinformation on a daily basis, according to the Stop Funding Hate report, and it is clear that the company still has a long way to go.
“Facebook is the Big Tobacco of our generation, greenwashing to avoid responsibility and sowing confusion and doubt about climate change in the global conversation,” the Real Facebook Oversight Board wrote in a statement.
Thousands of mostly young protesters gathered at a Fridays For Future rally in Glasgow, Scotland, the host city for the COP26 U.N. climate talks. The protest was part of a series of demonstrations being staged around the world Friday and Saturday. (photo: Alberto Pezzali/AP)
Or better yet, let us do it ourselves, many say.
"It's our future. Our future is being negotiated, and we don't have a seat at the table," said 20-year-old Boston College student Julia Horchos.
Horchos was one of the numerous young people inside the venue in Glasgow, Scotland, where government leaders, industry executives and activists are discussing how the world can avoid catastrophic climate change. But in her observer capacity, she's still kept outside the offices where real decisions are being made.
There are more young people than ever roaming the halls at the talks. That's in addition to the thousands of mostly young protesters carrying signs outside at a Fridays For Future rally some blocks from the fenced-off pavilion. Young people are being seen and celebrated in Glasgow. But they fear they're not being heard.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres and numerous other leaders have credited youth activism for reinvigorating the world's fight to curb climate change. The UN's theme Friday, in fact, was youth involvement, with leaders talking about how important young people are in the battle to keep the world from getting too hot and wild from extreme weather.
But even on a day dedicated to young people, the midday highlights were a speech by 73-year-old former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and a news conference by 77-year-old John Kerry, the U.S. climate envoy.
In her several days of going to sessions, Horchos said only one had time for members of the audience like her to talk — and that was a special youth event. Sure, Diana Bunge, a 21-year-old also from Boston College, got to hear from three CEOs of multinational corporations, and Horchos met Kerry, but they didn't get to make their case for their future.
"When I arrived at COP26, I could only see white middle-aged men in suits," Magali Cho Lin Wing, 17, a member of the UNICEF UK Youth Advisory Board, said at a press event. "And I thought, 'hold on is this a climate conference or some corporate event?' Is this what you came for? To swap business cards?"
Still, they know it's important to be at least near the room where it all happens.
"It's my life," Horchos said. "Its definitely my responsibility to step up."
Outside the negotiations, the worry about the future was the same, but the way it expressed was different.
At Glasgow's Kelvingrove Park, mostly young activists carried banners with slogans such as "I have to clear up my mess, why don't you clear up yours?" and "Stop climate crimes."
The protest was part of a series of demonstrations being staged around the world Friday and Saturday, to coincide with the talks in Scotland.
Some at the rally accused negotiators of "greenwashing" their country's failure to curb greenhouse gas emissions by trumpeting policies that sound good but won't do enough to prevent dangerous temperature rises in the coming decades.
"We are here as civil society to send them a message that 'enough is enough,'" said Valentina Ruas, an 18-year-old student from Brazil.
Brianna Fruean, a 23-year-old activist from Samoa, a low-lying Pacific island nation that is particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels and cyclones, said: "My biggest fear is losing my country."
"I've seen the floods go into our homes, and I've scooped out the mud," she said.
Fruean was given the stage at the beginning of the conference, known as COP26, where she told leaders about the effects of climate change already being felt in her country.
"I feel like I'm being seen," she said. "I will know if I've been heard by the end of COP."
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